THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 75
Meritocracy’s winners think their success is all due to their brains and effort.
BOOKS
MERIT BADGES
Is higher education an engine of social injustice?
BY LOUIS MENAND
ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT SAMUEL HANSON
I
n recent years, we have been focussed
on two problems, social mobility and
income inequality, and the place these
issues appear to meet is higher educa-
tion. That’s because education in the
United States is supposed to be meri-
tocratic. If the educational system is re-
producing existing class and status hi-
erarchies—if most of the benefits are
going to students who are privileged
already—then either meritocracy isn’t
working properly or it wasn’t the right
approach in the first place. Paul Tough,
in “The Years That Matter Most: How
College Makes or Breaks Us” (Hough-
ton Mifflin Harcourt), thinks that the
problem is a broken system. Daniel
Markovits, in “The Meritocracy Trap”
(Penguin Press), thinks that the whole
idea was a terrible mistake.
The term “meritocracy” was invented
in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical
intent that has now mostly been lost.
“Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q.
plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand
for a somewhat ineffable combination
of cognitive abilities, extracurricular
talents, and socially valuable personal
qualities, like leadership and civic-mind-
edness. Attributes extraneous to merit,
such as gender, skin color, physical able-
ness, and family income, are not sup-
posed to constrain the choice of edu-
cational pathways.
Educational sorting often begins
very early in the United States, as when
schoolchildren are selected for “gifted
and talented” programs, and it contin-
ues in high school, where some stu-
dents are pushed onto vocational tracks.
But every American has the right to
an elementary- and high-school edu-
cation. You just need to show up. Until
you are sixteen, you are required by law
to show up.
College is different. College is a
bottleneck. You usually have to apply,
and you almost always have to pay, and
college admissions is a straight-up sort-
ing mechanism. You are either selected
or rejected. And it matters where. Re-
search shows that the more selective a
college’s admissions process the greater
the economic value of the degree. The
narrower the entryway, the broader the
range of opportunities on the other side.
College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some
students for graduate and professional
education (law, dentistry, architecture).
And graduate and professional educa-
tion then sorts for the labor market. It’s
little gold stars all the way up.
College is also a kind of dating ser-
vice. You and your classmates have cho-
sen and been chosen by the same school,
which means that your classmates are
typically people whose abilities and in-
terests are comparable to your own. And,
for many people, friendships with other
students constitute the most valuable
return on their investment in college
education. One of the things they are
buying is entrance into a network of
classmates whose careers may intersect
profitably with theirs, and alumni who
can become references and open doors.
We find it unseemly when someone
is hired because his or her mom or dad
made a phone call. We think that’s un-
meritocratic. But we are not, usually,
taken aback when we learn that some-
one got a job interview through a college
roommate or an alumni connection,
even though that is also unmeritocratic.
We accept that those connections, along
with connections that students make
with their professors, are among the
things you “earn” by getting into a col-
lege. It’s one of the rewards for merit.
Education therefore plays an out-
sized role in people’s lives. It can vastly
outweigh the effects of family and local
community on people’s beliefs, values,
